Hello, I'm Matt Fairbrass

At the December 2015 SydCSS meetup I gave a talk on local scope in CSS, which I have written about previously. In the talk I discuss a few techniques we can use today to achieve encapsulation in CSS, including build tools like CSS Modules with Webpack, and examine the future specifications of the language (CSS4) which aim at introducing local... read more »

Git Aware Prompt is a really useful shell script written by Jim Myhrberg that displays your current git branch in the terminal prompt, saving you the hassle of having to type git status every time. As you can see from the screenshot above, my current branch is displayed in parenthesis in blue, and when I change branch, the branch name... read more »

In the past, deploying changes to production was as simple as uploading the edited files with an FTP client. But with the modern complex applications we build for the web today, often as part of a distributed team, deploying to production in this manner simply isn't fit for purpose. So what's the solution? Spend thousands of dollars on a deployment... read more »

When building applications for the web at scale, the need for a proper scope and encapsulation in CSS is becoming ever more apparent, without it our applications are fragile to change, and the house of cards that is CSS can quickly come crashing down around us. In this article I'll be examining some of the techniques we can use today... read more »

At the June 2015 SydCSS meetup I gave a five minute lightning talk on scaling CSS in large real-time applications. During this talk, I discuss some of the techniques we use at Lab49 to achieve scalability in CSS. Video Slides... read more »

CSS has evolved and changed much since its initial release {[{'1996-12-17' | age}]} years ago. Its introduction ushered in a new era of separation of concerns, keeping document content and its presentation separate from one another. Since then we have enjoyed a myriad of advancements in the language as it tries to keep pace with the ever changing design landscape of... read more »

Over the past few years design trends have seemingly accelerated, moving beyond skeuomorphic design into the brave new world of flat design, where minimalism and typography sit at the core of its methodology. As a result, it was time that my blog received a design facelift of sorts. In this article, I cover the design decisions I made, the inspirations... read more »